BUCHANAN, George.

Rerum Scoticarum historia, libris xx descripta . . . Auctore Georgio Buchanano Scoto. Accessit de iure regni apud Scotos dialogus, eodem auctore.

Frankfurt, (colophon: Johann Feyerabend, heirs of Sigmund Feyerabend), 1594. 8vo (185 x 105 mm), pp. [viii], 767, [1, blank], [104]; occasional light foxing, but an excellent copy in contemporary vellum, slightly soiled. The original edition of the Historia appeared at Edinburgh in 1582. A better text first appeared in the Frankfurt edition of 1584 (see Durkan p. xv), which, like the present Frankfurt printing, also included De jure regni, first published separately at Edinburgh in 1579 (and condemned by the Scottish parliament in 1584).Amidst the tumult of the Reformation in Scotland, ‘Buchanan’s search for meaning and reassurance led him, not to the Bible and the doctrine of sola scriptura, but to an austere neo-Stoic rationalism anchored in classical antiquity. It is the civic-mindedness of republican Rome, therefore, rather than the Mosaic convenant of Old Testament Israel which informs Buchanan’s Historia just as it permeates his De iure regni apud Scotos dialogus, [an] elegant defence of elective monarchy and the right of popular resistance . . . . The two works are closely linked: the Historia fleshing out the more abstract vision of a classical Scottish republic adumbrated in the De iure regni, and historicising the civic values, rooted in reason and natural law, which the Scottish nobility had allegedly acted on in deposing Mary Stewart in 1567. Yet the Historia did rather more than simply validate the conduct of a Stoic aristocracy when faced with a less-than-Stoic queen. It also lent the weight of Buchanan’s formidable reputation to the elaborate national mythistoire, focused on the unrivalled continuity of Scotland’s ancient line of kings, which had been developed by the medieval Scottish chroniclers . . . . Buchanan was clearly . . . concerned to defend Scottish autonomy in the face of England’s claim to a pan-Britannic empire founded on the belief in Scotland’s feudal dependency on the English crown. Buchanan’s vitriolic attack on the Welsh antiquary, Humphrey Lhuyd, was thus fuelled by something more than a desperate effort to salvage the historical foundations of his political theory. Lhuyd’s Breviary of Britayne [1573] certainly held up to ridicule . . . Scotland’s mythical prehistory; but it did so as part of a wider agenda aimed at revivifying a British past – the glories of Brutus, Arthur and Constantine – which reduced Scotland to nothing more than a slavish dependency of England’s imperial crown. Whatever his views on British union . . . such Anglo-British imperialism was wholly at odds with the civic and highly patriotic activism which animates Buchanan’s Historia. For Buchanan, Scottish freedom – past, present and future – was underwritten above all else by Roman republican virtue’ (Mason, ‘Usable pasts: history and identity in Reformation Scotland’, in Kingship and the commonweal pp. 182–3).Adams B3058; Durkan 237; Shaaber B752.

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• libraire: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)